When I started writing poetry back in the 1980s you almost never saw rhyme in contemporary poetry. In fact, there was such a prejudice against it that the mere mention of rhyme would send most “serious” poets to file 13 to unload their lunch. God forbid a Postmodern poet should rhyme.

But that has changed since those days. Rhyme is back in. But why?

Good question, but before I answer it let me just say that rhyme is en vogue now in ways that you might not imagine. It isn’t a traditional rhyme. We don’t use the ab ab ab iambic pentameter of Shakespeare and Donne, but we do like rhyme. Today’s rhyme, however, comes in one of two forms:

1. End Rhyme Cleverly Disguised – You’ll find writers of Petrarchan Sonnets writing in traditional rhyme schemes, but the poems are so conversational you just skip over the rhymes without noticing them there. Other poets also have learned to cleverly disguise their end rhymes by using enjambment and other devices such as hyphenated words that flow from one line to another where the syllables at the ends of the lines rhyme. These are clever uses of rhyme and I’m glad to see poets using this device more creatively.
2. Internal Rhyme – Another type of rhyme that is very popular now is internal rhyme. Today’s poet is not afraid to rhyme three or four successive words, sometimes separated by punctuation but often not, or twisting the internal rhyme into a near rhyme. And many crafty poets will use internal rhyme and near rhyme together very effectively.

I must say that I like both of these types of rhymes and I’ve been employing these devices since I’ve started writing poetry in the late 1980s. I’m glad to see that other poets agree that rhyme is not so bad after all. So why has poetry started to pick up on rhyme again as a useful device?

Paradigm Shifts: The String Of The
Postmodern Revolution
I think the answer might lie in a parallel to what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift, aka a scientific revolution. I believe, as Kuhn believed, that knowledge does not progress in a linear fashion, but that new developments in any field, be it science, philosophy, business management, or the arts, arise as a result of periodic transformations. In other words, it is largely generational.

But these revolutions do not necessarily spring up over night. They are not volcanoes that just suddenly erupt. They are more like seething cauldrons that well up over time. Generally, previous ideas give birth to new paradigms that later become accepted by a few then eventually enter into general acceptance. What was once the enigmatic becomes the cultural norm. But this happens like a slow flood rising.

As an example, Postmodernism rose out of the ideas of Modernism, but it came later really. It was Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams who most influenced the Postmodernists, mostly through the Black Mountain School of poetics. The seeds of Postmodernism in poetry were borne out in the philosophies of Williams. He was a precursor.

While you can measure the trends in poetry and poetics through the 20th century, the underpinnings of Postmodernism are really philosophical. Philosophy has always been the cornerstone to the building of art. Jacques Derrida is credited with being the person who coined the phrase “Deconstruction,” the movement that popularized Postmodernism in art and literature, particularly literature. The year was 1967 and from then on through the 1980s, and perhaps midway through the 1990s, Postmodernism (i.e. Deconstruction) was the dominant theme in literature. That’s about par for the course because paradigm shifts occur about every 20 or 30 years.

But where did Derrida get his ideas from? Largely from philosophers such as Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Foucault, and Levi-Strauss. But who were they and when did they reach their peak of influence?

• Heidegger – philosopher, authored Being and Time (1927), field of hermeneutics, existentialist
• Kierkegaard - Christian philosopher, existentialist, authored Either/Or (1843)
• Husserl – Philosopher, phenomenology, authored Logical Investigations (1900)
• Foucault – Philosopher, epistemology, authored several notable books between 1961-1966
• Levi-Strauss – Anthropologist, authored The Raw and the Cooked (1964)

You can see that some of these influences upon Derrida are his own contemporaries, but a few are not. In fact, the most interesting of these are Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger, who himself was influenced by Husserl, who was Heidegger’s intellectual mentor, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. If you see a common strain here then you’ve done more than pay attention. There is a philosophical string that runs from the unorthodox religious ideas of Kierkegaard and from the nihilistic ideas of Nietzsche through time to Derrida. The seeds of Postmodernism as a philosophy were planted with these two 19th century thinkers and were watered by Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, but they didn’t bear real fruit until 100 years after the planting when Derrida and Foucault reigned and ushered in the era of Deconstruction.

So what happened that led to the acceptance of rhyme again in poetry? If the Deconstructionists were afraid of rhyme then why do their children and grandchildren embrace it? I think it may have something to do with a different philosophical string that has run through the 20th century but from a different list of philosophers.

The History of Rhyme
Even while the harvest of Postmodernism was running its course, there was a more conservative and traditional road moving through the wood, almost parallel to the other fork. That road led to the garden of the New Formalists, who started to gain recognition in the late 1980s and really engaged the culture of poetics and American life in the 1990s. Among these poets were Dana Gioia, Mark Jarman, Frederick Turner, and others who believed that traditional rhyme and meter was natural and the “right way” to write poetry. Dana Gioia has been the most influential of these and currently serves as the chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts.

Rather than trace the history of philosophical thought under the respectable veneer of the New Formalists, I’ll simply trace their influences back to a root – not “the” root – who was a contemporary of Williams. Contemporaries to Gioia and Jarman include Howard Nemerov, Donald Justice, and Richard Wilbur. All of these are fine poets in their own right, but they are the core of the modern New Formalists. Preceding them, in the 1970s, was a man is perhaps best known for his children’s verse, X.J. Kennedy.

Wilbur, born in 1921, was the U.S. poet laureate from 1987-1988. Nemerov served in that position from 1988-1990. Anthony Hecht, who was popular from the 1950s through the 1970s and wrote a type of light verse that included double dactyls, for which he is well known. Allen Tate served as poet laureate consultant to the Library of Congress, the forerunner to today’s poet laureateship position, from 1943-1944. He was very popular and widely read in his time and was friends with Robert Penn Warren, Hart Crane, and John Crowe Ransom, previously mentioned as the seed of the New Formalists.

Ransom is not really a major poet, but he influenced some major poets to include W.H. Auden, Tate, and Warren. He founded the school of New Criticism and has been a huge influence upon the conservative literary schools of the 20th century, the type of schools that Ron Silliman calls “The School of Quietude.” Ransom may be best known today for his essays than his poetry, but he has been influential in both regards.

So What? So Rhyme Is ‘Back In’
Today’s poets – and I am one of them – care much less about drawing lines in the sand than do either the New Formalists or the Language Poets, who might be said to be the two opposite extremes of the Right Wing and the Left Wing of American poetics. They are like the Dick Cheneys and the Dennis Kuciniches of the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. But poets of the 21st century, at least at this juncture – I’ll say the post-911 poets – which I prefer to call Millennials, do not care about left/right distinctions in terms of what we can read and learn from. Today I might write a sonnet or a sestina, but tomorrow I may relish in a Beat-like political rant. There are no more boundaries.

I see this as a positive. There is no reason to place mumbo-jumbo on a pedestal above everything else. Likewise, it makes equally less sense to catapult rhyme and meter to a level of worship and adoration reserved only for the gods. Certainly, rhyme and meter and fun word games are both very good devices to be used in poetry (sometimes together). What today’s poet must do is study all strings of philosophical thought and poetics and take from them what is best suited for one’s own voice. The primary concern should be to offer something unique, but to do that you must know what has been done in the past, by whom, and for what purposes. When you nail it down (which you won’t) then, and only then, will you be able to offer your own sacrifice to the idols of device, rhyme or no rhyme.